IRL 4, October 13, 2009

URL; http://www.cliffordmay.org/1906/a-creeping-coup-is-russia-heading-back-to-the-ussr

This article was written by Clifford May (the President of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies), for Scripps Howard News Service. It was written on March 10, 2004, and relates to the political climate of Russia at the time, which is that Russia is reverting back to its communist ways. This is very connected to what we are studying in class about single party states. When Russia first started to head toward Communism when Lenin was powerful, one of the things that happened was that Lenin and the Bolsheviks tried to crush all opposition and take power away from the wealthy, and from business owners. According to this article, arbitrary arrests were made in Russia recently (2004) and according to a State Department report issued that year, Vladimir Putin's (Russia's president's) government has been threatening members of opposition groups (Lenin did this!), manipulating the media (Lenin silenced newspapers and did the same thing but in a different way), and harassing businessmen. This sounds vaguely familiar to me. The value of this article is that a lot of what it is saying sounds familiar and relates to what we are studying about Russia when it first headed toward communism. Russia became a single-party state and these incidents were happening (harrassing of businessmen, crushing opposition) before Russia became communist, and since these same things are happening nowadays, it gives me a hint that history might repeat itself. I know what happened before and I am seeing it happening again so inferences can be made. One limitation of this article is that it was written in 2004, so it's not known from this article if Russia has moved even closer to communism since then. Another limitation is that although the same incidences are happening now that happened before in Lenin's time, it is not known if this necessarily means Russia is reverting back to communism, or if it is just a coincidence that there are similar circumstances.